If nothing else, Law School taught me to be intellectually flexible about the text of the law -- what the text might mean, what it could mean, what it shouldn't mean, and how its various applications could be evolved by engaging it as an open rather than a closed text. The law allows for what is beautifully termed "the enlightened conscience of the jury" to be the ultimate determiner of whether the spirit of the law has been broken in many given situations.
In short, I learned in law school how to always at least try to read and interpret the law with my conscience.
I practiced law for 4 years before I encountered Christ. Right after that, in 1990, I left my practice for two years and attended seminary at Regent University. Sometimes I asked questions that got me on the professors' bad side.
One such incident occurred during my first week in my hermeneutics class. I was excited because I was sure this class would show me the best way to read the Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. Here the professor said we would learn rules that would keep us from ever quoting passages out of their historical or grammatical context.
There was no place allowed for our conscience to be our illuminative guide in any of these concreted rules. If Scripture, by the surface letter, portrayed God as a child-drowning, infant-burning, throat-slitting, plague-sending, people-smiting killer, then our conscience couldn't dare say otherwise. I thought to myself, "I came to seminary to learn this?"
The more I learned these clinically complex rules, the more disturbed I became. I had studied the Bible with fresh eyes for the previous 15 months before entering seminary and had noticed a very obvious thing. When Jesus, Paul, and most of the other New Testament writers, quoted the Old Testament, they broke every rule this professor was advocating. They all routinely took Old Testament Scripture out of its original historical context, out of its original grammatical context, and out of its surface meaning context. Instead, they freely reinterpreted the Old Testament passage altogether whenever they felt inspired to do so. This blew my mind. Below were some of the examples I raised to my professor.
Old Testament "historical characters" were depersonalized to instead represent New Testament spiritual dynamics. In Galatians 4:21-31, the characters of Sarah and Hagar, along with Isaac and Ishmael, were now transfigured by Paul to instead represent two distinct and contrasting covenants. Hagar and Ishmael were transfigured into the Old Covenant of the law, while Sarah and Isaac were transfigured into the New Covenant of the Spirit.
Similarly, entire "historical narratives" were reinterpreted as allegories meant to illuminate our own current spiritual journey as New Covenant Christians (1 Corinthians 10:1-11). Here,the Israelite's PHYSICAL walk through the waters of the Red Sea in the Old Testament transfigured into a type of our SPIRITUAL walk into being baptized into Christ. Elsewhere, in the book of Hebrews, Israel's Old Testament journey into the Promised land was now transfigured by the writer of Hebrews into an allegory of a New Testament believer's journey to enter into the spiritual and relational rest of God where we cease from our own works and enter into His (Hebrews 4:1-11).
Old Testament ceremonial "objects" were transfigured to now represent some aspect of Jesus and His Kingdom of light. Jesus frequently allegorized objects in the Old Testament. Using key imagery from Old Testament passages which were ONLY seen as literal, He would then transfigure their literal meaning into an allegorical application toward Himself. He referred to Himself as the Temple of God (John 2:19-22), the true manna from heaven (John 6:50), Jacob's supernatural ladder (John 1:51), the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:38-40), the IAM burning bush of Exodus 3 (John 8:58), the Brazen Serpent in the wilderness who was lifted up on a pole to provide healing for all (John 3:14-15), etc.
Let's look at some other examples from the mind of Paul. Literal foreskin-circumcision in the Old Testament transfigures into spiritual heart-circumcision in the New Testament (Romans 2:29). The Law written on literal-tablets of stone in the Old Testament transfigures into the Law of Christ's love written on the spiritual-tablets of our heart in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 3:3-9). The literal-temple in the Old Testament transfigures into the spiritual-temple of our living bodies in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). The writer of Hebrews, in fact, in chapters 9 and 10 transfigures all the Temple objects, the Temple ceremonies, and even the law itself, into allegorical shadows of a greater inner dynamic to be found now only in Christ. Paul confirms this in Colossians 2:17 when he likewise transfigures the Old Testament's holy days, its dietary laws, and its religious festivals into allegorical shadows of spiritual realities found in Christ. And the list goes on and on.
The point is that all these New Testament applications listed above of were all out of context, both grammatically and historically. In short, Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament writers would have flunked my (and most any other) seminary class on hermeneutics. That should give us pause.
Jesus and the New Testament writers reimagined the Old Testament as a treasure trove of subtext-- imbedded shadows, symbols, metaphors, enigmas and and types which all point to some facet of Jesus and the Kingdom of God. This is the type of allegory in which the Old Testament text means MORE or OTHER than what it is grammatically and contextually saying. And so should we.
The New Testament now fills in the gaping holes in knowledge about God's nature which the Old Testament left us. And when these gaps are filled, the semantic content of the Old Testament changes into Christological manna.
And by the way, I never did get an answer from my seminary professor.
Thank you, Richard Murray, for this article. Long ago (1970s) I also attended Regent but for me it was eye-opening and affirming. I hope other professors were more open to other interpretations.
I recently have been reading people like Gregory Boyd (Crucifixion of the Warrior God) and Sigve Tonstad (Revelation; and God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense) and really appreciated them.
During COVID restrictions, I've been meeting with other Christians because my own church is closed to in-person meeting. I found that these friends are big believers in predestination which I consider a dangerous doctrine. I found your list of verses that counter that view (God wants ALL to be saved) and was very grateful. Thank you again.
Posted by: Martha Greenhow | July 05, 2021 at 07:12 AM